


Misty Watercolor Memories

by ArgentumCivitas



Category: Reno: 911!
Genre: 5+1 Things, Character Study, F/M, Found Family, Happy Ending, Imagined Backstory, Implied Consensual Underage Sex, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Impulsive Decisions, Las Vegas, Running Away, Steely Dan - Freeform, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Tattoos, Things Better Left Unsaid, Underage Drinking, accidental animal death, annoying co-workers, bad relationships, cheating on a partner, firearms, not an endorsement of real-life law enforcement, sincere apologies, the most savage and brutal hangover, theoretically canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:22:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29164155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentumCivitas/pseuds/ArgentumCivitas
Summary: The stories behind five tattoos that Clementine got and one that she didn’t.
Relationships: James Garcia/Clementine Johnson
Comments: 16
Kudos: 3





	1. The Book of Bad Decisions

**Author's Note:**

> These are still a thing, right? I thought this would be a fun experiment. Four of these tattoos are canon-compliant; I had to make up the other two, but they seem like they’d be pretty plausible ones for Clementine to have. As with everything Reno 911!, nothing gets in the way of a good story, setup, or punchline, so any inconsistencies between this and canon are entirely congruent with the show’s universe.
> 
> Each chapter will include an opening note that carries any necessary trigger warnings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: underage drinking and implied drug use.

_A blurry, blown-out, faded design that might, at one time, have been something that looked kind of like a flower._

The whole thing had been her friend Robin’s idea in the first place. Robin had gone to a party the night before and met a guy who called himself Cobra and who drew a pretty nice-looking butterfly, in Sharpie, on the back of her right shoulder. When she pulled her shirt aside to show it off to Clementine and Heather at school, at the beginning of math class, Robin said, “He told me that if I give him fifty bucks, he’ll tattoo it on right there.”

“Does he do other stuff?” Heather asked, though her interest sounded more polite and a little skeptical. Heather was too much of a wuss to do something like that.

“Probably,” Robin said, as the bell rang and stopped their conversation. But Robin passed Clementine a note in the middle of class that said, _We’re going this Friday, are you in?_ and she wrote back _Sure_ , mostly because she was curious. It wasn’t like she was going to actually get a tattoo herself.

Heather’s mom dropped off Heather at Clementine’s house on Friday night for what they had told her was a regular sleepover. The three of them did this all the time—Heather would tell her mom she was going to Clementine’s, and Robin would tell her mom she was going to Heather’s, and Clementine…well, she didn’t have to tell her mom anything. Beulah was always either working a long-haul flight or out with a new boyfriend, or sometimes both, one right after the other. As of that day, it had been almost a week since Clementine had seen Beulah for more than about five minutes.

Robin arrived shortly after Heather and the three of them got ready to go all together. “Is anyone else going to be there?” Heather said, twisting her hair like she did when she got anxious.

“Just think of it like a party,” Clementine said to her reflection in the mirror, and reapplied her Dr. Pepper lip gloss.

The downside of being fifteen meant that none of them could drive, so they had to take the bus to Cobra’s place, which was out by the community college. The address he had given Robin turned out to be a little run-down house, and when Robin knocked on the front door, an elderly woman answered. “Can I help you girls?” she said, removing a sour-burned–smelling, hand-rolled cigarette from her mouth.

“Um, we’re looking for someone named Cobra?” Robin said, hesitantly. “He gave me this address.”

The old woman gave them a kind smile and said, with an exhale of acrid smoke, “He lives downstairs. Go around the back, it should be open.”

“Thank you,” Clementine said, as the old woman closed the door. She let Robin lead the way off the porch and around the house and said, “Wait, was she smoking pot?”

“That’s what it smells like,” Robin said with confidence, opening the basement door and heading down the stairs. There was another door at the bottom, through which soft music could be heard, and she knocked five times, decisively.

This time, the person answering the door looked a lot more like someone who might be named Cobra. He was tall and lanky, with shaggy dark hair and a safety pin through one of his earlobes, and was wearing black jeans and a ratty Iron Maiden T-shirt. “Yeah?” he said, very obviously looking the girls up and down.

“Remember me?” Robin said, in a shaky attempt to flirt. “I’m Robin. You said I should bring fifty bucks if I wanted a tattoo.”

“Come on in,” he said, still without recognition, holding the door open for the three of them. The basement was dim and sparsely furnished, and it smelled like a combination of gingersnap cookies and tobacco smoke. There was someone else inside, too—another man seated in a corner of the ancient couch, his hair bleached so blond it was almost white and with a huge, bristly goatee. He stubbed out a black cigarette as the girls came in but didn’t get up, just looked up at them. “Who are you, again?” the first guy said, to Robin, as he crossed the room, sat down in the rolling desk chair, and grabbed a notebook.

“Robin,” Robin said. “You drew this butterfly for me,” and she pulled off her shirt to show off the faded drawing on her shoulder. Cobra (at least, Clementine assumed he was Cobra) turned on the desk lamp and looked at the drawing, then made a note in the notebook and put it back in the desk drawer.

“You still want it?” he asked Robin, who nodded. “All right. Where’s the cash?” Robin dug two crumpled twenties and a ten out of the pocket of her jeans and handed them over to Cobra, who stuffed them into his own pocket. “I’ve gotta redraw it first, this is gonna take a bit. Have a seat,” he said to Robin, as he got up from the chair and gestured for her to sit down. When she did, he repositioned her so that she was sideways in the chair, her shoulder in the light from the desk lamp. He looked over at Heather and Clementine, who were still standing, not knowing quite what to do. “You’d better sit down, too,” he said, inclining his head toward the couch and heading for the small kitchen.

Heather got to the couch first and sat down as far away from the man as she could, leaving Clementine to squeeze in right between the two of them, as the man grinned at her. “I’m Spike,” he said, surprisingly non-threatening despite his appearance.

“Clementine,” she said. Beulah wasn’t one for prolonged motherly chats, but she had taught Clementine the importance of being polite and accommodating, especially when men were concerned. “And this is Heather,” she said, as Heather gave a small smile and started up with her hair-twisting again. Heather was the shyest of the three of them and usually needed to be pushed into talking to anyone male.

Spike lit up another one of the black cigarettes and said, “You girls want a drink?”

“Sure,” Clementine said. It seemed like the polite thing to do, and it wasn’t as though they were going to be driving anywhere. Spike got up and as he did, Cobra came out of the kitchen, drying his hands on a small, filthy towel. He threw it aside and, grabbing a Sharpie from the desk, pulled another chair up to where Robin was sitting, uncapped the marker and started tracing over the lines that he’d drawn before.

Clementine watched him work for a moment until Spike handed her a glass, filled with something brown and with a single misshapen ice cube in it. “Thanks,” she said, taking it from him as he handed one to Heather as well. It smelled sweet and a little spicy, kind of like cherries and cinnamon, with a sharp alcohol bite underneath it. She took a sip and realized it was even more delicious than it smelled. “What is it?” she said to Spike, as he took a drag off of his cigarette and the warmth from the alcohol started to spread through her.

“Southern Comfort,” he said. She licked her lips and as the Dr. Pepper lip gloss taste mixed in with the cherry-cinnamon taste, Clementine felt very fancy indeed.

Clementine finished her drink quickly, mostly because she found it to be so delicious. Heather was nursing her glass, clearly not enjoying her evening nearly as much as Clementine was, and Robin had been getting more and more visibly nervous as Cobra drew in the details of the butterfly, her right foot starting to bounce. Robin had talked a big game, but once Cobra put down the Sharpie and opened the desk drawer where he kept his tattoo tools, taking out the ink and the homemade gun patched together with electrical tape, her eyes got wide. He uncapped the ink, loaded the gun, and switched it on, but as it started to buzz and the needle touched her skin for the first time, Robin yelped and jumped out of the chair. “I’m sorry, I can’t do it,” she gasped, almost hyperventilating.

Cobra switched the gun off and put it down on the desk, then crossed his arms and glared at Robin. “No refunds,” he said.

Looking back at it later, Clementine didn’t know exactly what made her speak up at that moment. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe she didn’t want to be rude, and maybe it was just a random impulse. But there they all were, with a perfectly good tattoo paid for and it not being done, and she just couldn’t stand to walk out and see it go to waste.

“I’ll do it,” Clementine said, and everyone in the room looked at her at once. She took Heather’s drink out of her hands, downed it in one gulp, then got up and took Robin’s spot in the chair. “A tattoo’s a tattoo, right?” she said to Cobra.

He thought for a moment, and then nodded. “What do you want?”

She looked around at the posters tacked up on the walls, saw one with a small white flower in one of the corners. “That flower,” she said, pointing at it. “On my ankle.” She figured that would be an easy spot to keep hidden from Beulah. _Besides_ , she thought, _you’re only fifteen once_.

Clementine took off her left shoe and sock while Robin put her shirt back on and collapsed on the couch, trying to breathe normally again. Heather just stared at Clementine, almost in disbelief, as Cobra took out the Sharpie again and started drawing. It tickled a little bit as the marker glided over her skin, but soon enough it was done, and from what she could see, it looked like the most beautiful little flower in the world.

The buzz of the tattoo gun was almost comforting, and the alcohol had truly kicked in by the time the needle touched her skin, so it didn’t hurt that much. She held as still as she could as Cobra worked and watched him. He had long, sensitive fingers, and he would stop every so often to tuck his hair back behind his ears. The light from the desk lamp threw the other side of his face into dramatic but beautiful shadow, and it made her exposed skin look a little like it was glowing, because she was so pale. He cradled her foot so carefully, so tenderly that she felt like a queen, or like a goddess, with a devoted worshiper paying her tribute. She almost wished that she’d picked something bigger—she never wanted that reverent feeling of adoration to stop.

When it was all over, Cobra put a huge Band-Aid on top of everything and just told her, “Don’t pick the scabs.” Robin had thrown up in the bathroom, coming down off the adrenaline, and Heather had twisted up all her hair into impossible knots, so the two of them couldn’t wait to leave, but Clementine was the last one out the door.

“Thank you so much, Cobra,” she said, giving him a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“It’s Brandon,” he said, and she thought she could see him blush a little, “but you’re welcome,” and he closed the door behind her.

Clementine didn’t pick the scabs, but when they eventually fell off, she found that Brandon was not the great artist that she had imagined him to be. The flower that had looked so beautiful down in the basement was, by the harsh light of day, more of a blurry, blown-out, vaguely flower-shaped mess.

For a while, she thought about getting something to cover it up, but each time, she’d make an appointment and then, like Robin had, she’d chicken out at the last minute. There were lots of things that she’d done that she wanted to forget, and she always thought that this would be just one more to add to the list. But then she would look at the messy, clumsy design and remember the powerful way that she had felt while Brandon—she always thought of him as Brandon afterward—was creating it. In a strange way, most of the stuff she had done since then was just an attempt to try and find that feeling again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this goes without saying, but if you're going to get a tattoo, don't get one from a guy in a basement.


	2. Vamonos, Vamonos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Implied consensual underage sex and underage drinking.

**__** _A faded green bullfrog, sitting on a tree stump and playing the banjo, with four musical notes drifting away._

“If you’re gone when I get back, Clementine Johnson,” Beulah said, fluffing her hair in the hallway mirror and checking her lipstick, “then don’t you bother coming home at all.” They’d just had a screaming fight about Clementine’s plans for spring break, but Beulah was booked to work the red-eye to LaGuardia and she was already running late. Clementine just rolled her eyes as her mother grabbed her purse and left, and when she heard the car leave the driveway, she picked up the phone. When Robin answered, Clementine didn’t even bother greeting her.

“Beulah’s gone,” she said. “When are we leaving?”

Robin sucked in a breath and said, “My mom won’t let me go and Heather’s mom won’t let her go either.”

“You’re kidding,” Clementine said. “We had this planned for **months**. You can’t wuss out on me now.” She’d been stealing twenties out of Beulah’s wallet for the last five months or so, one or two at a time, slow enough so she wouldn’t be detected, and she easily had a few hundred bucks by now. This trip down to Vegas for spring break was going to be the best part of their senior year, and now neither Robin nor Heather could go? “Are you scared of your mom?”

“A little, yeah,” Robin said. Robin’s mom had always been nice enough to Clementine, but she’d just started a new job down at the Sheriff’s Department, and now she was legally allowed to carry a gun. Besides, ever since Clementine had gotten the tattoo that Robin had originally paid for, Robin had lost her position as the leader of their little group as Clementine had slowly taken over.

“Well, I’m not,” Clementine said, “and I’m going, with or without you.” She didn’t wait for Robin’s reply and slammed down the phone. In that moment, she was done with Reno and with everyone in it.

Their original plan was for Heather to drive, but since that wasn’t an option anymore, Clementine ended up out at the good truck stop, with her pilfered stash in her wallet and the spare hundred dollars that Beulah kept in the cigar box in the kitchen tucked into her bra. When she walked into the building, she quickly surveyed the men at the diner counter and picked out the most attractive one—short dark hair, balding a little at the temples, but with a close-cropped beard and wearing a short-sleeved work shirt. She noticed, as she slid into the seat next to him, that he had broad hands and well-muscled forearms, and that he gave her a smile as she said, “Hey there, buy me a coffee?”

His name was Neil, and she introduced herself as Trina (since that was the name on her fake ID), and by the time their coffees were done, Clementine had a ride down to Vegas and a whole new appreciation for bearded men.

Neil drove an old Chevy pickup with a bench seat and a cool bumper sticker on the back, a frog sitting on a tree stump playing a banjo, that Clementine caught a glimpse of as she threw her bag into the truck bed. They talked a little more as they headed out of Reno, east on I-80 and then south on I-95, but as the traffic thinned out and their conversation died down, Clementine slipped out of her seatbelt and slid across the bench seat to cuddle up next to Neil as he drove. She said, “It’s cold,” even though it wasn’t at all, and he didn’t stop her, just draped his arm across her shoulders and pulled her close.

Well, at that point, there wasn’t anything else for Clementine to do but start to explore the landscape that was Neil. His forearms weren’t the only well-muscled part of him, she found, and it was only about twenty more miles before she unbuckled his belt, unzipped his jeans, and dropped her head down into his lap, both of them shifting around to find the perfect rhythm.

He made sure to return the favor for her, later that night when they stopped at the cheap motel in Hawthorne, and again when they arrived in Vegas the next day. In fact, the more time she spent with Neil, the more Clementine was convinced that all the high-school boys she’d been with were nothing more than a twitchy, fumbling waste of her time.

Her world dissolved into the next day, the next hour, the next minute. They did everything they could do that was cheap or free: driving up and down the Strip in Neil’s old truck, walking through the giant casinos, watching all the other people. They’d end up at the In-N-Out Burger on Tropicana or in dim dive bars far off the Strip, where she’d quickly down a Southern Comfort on the rocks and surreptitiously fondle him under the table, and then he’d pay for their drinks and sweep her back to the motel where they were staying.

After what was probably four days—time had no meaning in a city where nothing ever closed—Clementine came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, and Neil was just hanging up the phone. His suitcase was closed on the bed. “Who was that?” Clementine asked.

“My wife,” Neil said, and she just looked at him, in disbelief. _His wife?_ she thought. “She’s ready to work things out.”

“But…I thought…” Clementine couldn’t find the words. She loved Neil, she thought they’d be together forever. Maybe not here like this, but somewhere, at least.

Neil shook his head. “Look, Clementine.” She’d told him her real name on that first early morning, back in the cheap motel in Hawthorne. “What are you, twenty-three, twenty-four?”

“Seventeen,” she said, in a small voice.

“Jesus Christ, _fuck me_ ,” he said, his eyes widening. “I’m _thirty-five_. Motherfucker.” He pulled out his wallet, scooped out all the cash, thrust it into her hands. “I’ve gotta get out of here. I’ll pay for the room for another week, don’t come after me and please, **please** , don’t call the fuckin’ cops on me.” And with that, he grabbed his suitcase and was gone.

Clementine sat down on the edge of the bed, dazed by what had just happened. She let the money fall from her hands—it was probably a hundred dollars, not enough to get back to Reno. But she couldn’t go back to Reno now. _What am I going to do?_ she thought. In any other circumstance, she would have started crying and never stopped. But this was not the time for crying. The clock was ticking and she only had a week to figure out the calculus of how to survive in Las Vegas.

She slowly got up from the bed and looked at herself in the mirror. Then she let the towel drop to the floor. Neil had told her, many times over their time together, how beautiful she was. She tilted her head a little bit, shifted her shoulders to see how her breasts moved. If he had thought she was twenty-three and that she was beautiful, it stood to reason that other men might think she was twenty-three and find her beautiful, too.

Clementine got dressed in the nicest underwear she had and her most revealing outfit and found the phone book and a pen. She flipped through it until she found the listings for “gentlemen’s clubs” and started calling the numbers, one by one, to ask if they were hiring. Most of the places just hung up on her, but she marked the ones that didn’t, and once she had a list, she tore out a page from the front of the Gideon bible and wrote down the addresses.

The first club rejected her on the spot, as did the second, and the third. The fourth club let her up on stage for one song, as a tryout, but the Tuesday-night crowd was tight-fisted and unforgiving to novices, and she had to split the eighteen dollars of limp and sweaty singles that she made with the club’s manager. By the time she got to the Raging Kitten, she was getting desperate. What Clementine didn’t know until later was that Sam, the Kitten’s manager, was desperate too, as two of his best dancers had just walked out that night and he was willing to hire absolutely anyone to replace them.

Despite its name and its decidedly downmarket clientele and reputation, the Raging Kitten was a pretty nice place to work. Sam needed his bifocals pretty badly but was vain about it, so he wasn’t wearing them when he checked Clementine’s ID to fill out her paperwork, and he ran the place with a soft touch. Instead of being threatened, the other girls quickly figured out that Clementine was brand-new to the strip-club game and treated her like their baby sister. She moved out of the motel within a couple of weeks and in with Nancy-Ann, who was the most motherly of all of the girls and who taught Clementine (who called herself Holiday up on stage and Trina when the men asked for her real name) how to hang upside down from the pole by her ankles.

When her birthday arrived and she turned eighteen, Clementine told absolutely no one about it, because everyone thought she was already well into her twenties. But she still wanted to do something special for herself to mark the occasion. She’d had to call off from work—her period had showed up early and that put her out of commission for at least four days—and besides, the night before, she’d been up on the stage and looked out into the crowd and seen a man who, for a brief moment, looked exactly like Neil. She hadn’t thought of him for more than a passing moment in six months, in the grind of pretending that all the other men she talked to the course of her work were the most interesting men in the world, at least for as long as they were paying for her company.

It was only a half-formed idea, but she grabbed her car keys and was out the door before she could talk herself out of it. Nancy-Ann was in the middle of a prolonged tattoo project on her back and Clementine had gone with her to a couple of the sessions to keep her company, so she knew the way to the tattoo parlor, and she hadn’t yet been to the bank to deposit the half of her earnings from the previous night that she usually saved.

It took about forty-five minutes of looking through the books of flash, but she eventually found a design that was close enough to what she remembered the bumper sticker on Neil’s truck looked like—the frog, sitting on the tree stump, playing the banjo. She had the artist add four musical notes, drifting away, for the four days they’d spent together. “Where do you want it?” he asked her.

Clementine remembered how she’d fall asleep with Neil holding her close, his strong hand always resting perfectly on the outside of her right breast. That had to be the spot, and that’s where the little frog ended up, an hour later. The artist had a light touch and the final result was much more delicate than the original design, almost a sketch rather than something fully realized in bold lines.

Nancy-Ann just shook her head when she saw it the next day. Clementine was putting on the aftercare lotion that the tattoo artist had given her; she’d had to do the same for Nancy-Ann before, so she knew how it worked. “What?” Clementine said.

“You fucked up your tits,” Nancy-Ann said, with a sigh. “No one’s gonna pay to see that shakin’ in their face. Come on,” she said, “you’re just lucky it’s small. Put your shirt on and let’s go.”

Nancy-Ann took Clementine to the closest Macy’s and from then on, her makeup bag always included a stick of ultra-pale Dermablend to cover up the little frog. She’d paint it on before her shifts and it would stay on, no matter how much she jiggled around or how sweaty she got. Sometimes she’d forget about the frog until she took a shower and then there it would be, staring right back at her.

She’d forgiven Neil long ago for leaving her in Vegas like he did. She’d romantically dreamed that it would last forever, but Clementine was too practical to truly believe that, even when she imagined it to herself. And she did exactly what Neil asked of her—she didn’t call the cops and she never tried to find him. Though it would have been tough to track him down because she hadn’t ever found out his last name.

Aside from her boyfriends, the only other person in Reno who got to see the little frog was Raineesha. Clementine didn’t know quite why she mentioned it while they were waiting at the presidential barricade, but when it came up in the course of their conversation, Raineesha said, “Let me see,” and Clementine couldn’t see the harm in showing her. She turned her back to the camera so she wouldn’t flash Joe and ended up flashing the President and half the Secret Service as they drove by. It was so absurd that they laughed about it later, especially once the footage made it onto the show. It was just the kind of thing the seventeen-year-old Clementine would have done, except on purpose instead of by accident.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a canonical tattoo. Clementine refers to it in Episode 213, "President Bush's Motorcade."
> 
> Note that the age of consent in Nevada is 16; I've erred on the side of caution when tagging and warning, since AO3 adheres to the overarching US standard.


	3. This Fragile Foundation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: implied drug use, cheating on a partner, implied domestic violence

_Originally the letters S T E E D, subsequently modified to read S T E E L Y D A N, and the artwork from the album cover of Steely Dan’s_ Gaucho

The note said, “I think you’re hot.” Clementine waited until the teacher was writing something on the board, something long and complicated, and then snuck a look around the room. Two rows behind her, to her left, a man was grinning at her, and when he saw that she was looking back at him, he gave her a wink. He had a black mullet and a surprisingly nice smile, and she could tell, even from the small glimpse that she got of him, that he was far too tall and burly for the little community-college classroom desks that they were all forced to sit in.

She turned back to face the front of the classroom, with a dismissive toss of her blonde hair, and tore a piece of paper out of her notebook. She thought for a moment and wrote back, “I don’t need you to tell me that,” folded up the note, and passed it back the way the first one had come.

It was the truth. Clementine didn’t need anyone to tell her that she was hot. She got the proof, nightly, in each of her shifts at the club. Being the fourth-best dancer at the sixth-best third-tier club down in Vegas made her just one more forgettable pretty face, but back home in Reno and armed with all the tricks she’d picked up, she was a star.

Still, it wasn’t going to last forever, and that’s why she was taking the GED class. She’d just turned twenty-six, which meant thirty was closer than it wasn’t. There was nothing sadder than a thirty-year-old dancer, making the rounds again and again to ask if anyone wanted a lapdance and getting rejected over and over. Clementine didn’t know yet what she was going to do with the rest of her life, but she knew that whatever it was, she’d need a GED to do it. And to get that, she had to make it through this class, pass the test…and ignore any more notes from tall, muscular strangers with nice smiles. At least for the moment.

The next day in class, after the break, Clementine found another note and a pack of Life Savers on her desk. The note said “Steed Lankershim,” with a phone number on it. She looked back to where the man—Steed—had been sitting, but he was gone. She folded the note back up and put it into her purse, though she had no intention of calling him, and slowly ate the Life Savers, one by one, over the course of the rest of the class, saving the cherry one for last so the taste would linger on her tongue for as long as possible.

Steed wasn’t back in the next class, but the day after, he was waiting outside as she arrived. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said. “What’s your name?”

Under any other circumstance, Clementine would have just blown him off with a snappy retort, but the previous night at the club, she had run into a brick wall of indifference, as every man she propositioned for a dance had rejected her. It didn’t happen a lot, but when it did, it always made her feel worthless, and hearing Steed call her gorgeous lifted her right out of her terrible mood. “Clementine,” she said.

“Clementine,” he said back to her. “How ‘bout you and I go out sometime?” he asked, with that surprisingly nice smile, the one that lit up his whole face. And he was so tall, and he looked like he could pick her up with just one arm…just imagining the possibilities made her feel a little weak in the knees.

For their first date, Steed took her to a tattoo convention downtown. He claimed he’d gotten the VIP passes from his cousin, and it was a real treat to walk around and look at all the art on display, both on the walls and on the people. By the end of the day, Clementine was thoroughly smitten, though she knew it would be a terrible idea to get heavily involved with someone with only three weeks to go before the GED test.

She kept Steed at as much of a distance as she could until the test was done, but the second it was over, Steed was the first person she called, and he picked her up in his red convertible and took her straight to the closest bar, a dive called Pete’s, for celebratory shots. That was the night she discovered that while Steed might not have been the most skilled of lovers, he was certainly the most enthusiastic, and that counted for a lot.

Steed was the first person who called her “Clemmy” without having it sound like a reproach or an insult. Clementine had always hated that nickname, but Steed made it sound nice and almost endearing. Maybe that was part of the reason why she went out and got his name tattooed across her back, in big bold letters, after she’d only been dating him for a week. Clementine had always made it a habit to trust her instincts, and she had fallen in love with Steed so hard and so fast that this felt like the right thing to do.

Of course, a tattoo of a name that big put a premature end to her dancing career, and while she was living off her savings, picking up short-term gigs here and there, and trying to figure out what kinds of jobs she was qualified for, Steed came knocking on her door with a quart-size Ziploc bag full of pot and Clementine took to it like a natural. She’d always avoided anything stronger than alcohol when she was working at the clubs, but now she didn’t have to watch herself so carefully anymore. Getting gently stoned each night while she listened to one of her favorite albums on repeat, either Steely Dan’s _Aja_ or _Gaucho_ , felt like the absolute height of luxury.

The bliss couldn’t last. Neither of them were made for peaceful domesticity at that point in their lives. Clementine hadn’t seen Steed in a couple of days—he did this sometimes, but he always came back—and when the phone rang, she assumed it was him telling her that he was on his way home. It was Steed, all right, but he wasn’t coming home at all. “Clemmy, can you come pick me up?” he said.

“Where are you?” she said. She figured he was in Sparks, or maybe Tahoe at the worst.

“I’m in jail,” he said, “down at the Sheriff’s Department. They’ll let me out if you sign for me.”

She drove down to the station in a rage, convinced that it was a setup and that they had the wrong guy. She knew Steed wasn’t the most upstanding citizen in Reno, but…it was Reno. Plenty of people much worse than Steed did much worse things than him all the time. Why couldn’t the cops hassle those people instead and leave Steed alone?

Clementine was all set to give the first cop she encountered a piece of her mind, but that resolution was swiftly forgotten when she saw the officer at the desk—tall, black, and devastatingly handsome. She completely forgot to ask what it was that Steed did to land himself in jail this time and just stared until the man said, “Can I help you?”

“Um, yes, I think so,” she said, “I’m here to sign for someone.” She didn’t want to mention that it was for Steed just yet to this gorgeous man, whose nametag just said “Jones.”

Jones chuckled a little. “I think I know who you’re here for,” he said. “Are you sure you want him back,” and here he paused and gave her a knowing look. “What’s your name?”

“Clementine,” she said, with a thrill. All of the rage from before had completely disappeared.

“You can call me Jonesy,” Jones said, writing something down on a scrap of paper from his notebook. “And if this ever happens again, call this number for the station—” he tapped the first phone number, “—and this is my number, if you ever need to get ahold of me. Personally.”

She laughed and took the paper from him. “Shouldn’t I just call 911?” she asked, flirting a little.

“Not if you want to get something done,” Jones said, with a wink.

The next time Steed disappeared and came home a few days later, he was as high as Clementine had ever seen him and he had another girl in the front seat of the car. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, and Clementine was uncomfortably reminded of when she’d run away from Reno at spring break all those years ago. She and Steed had another one of their screaming fights and he passed out in the front yard, and before Clementine drove the girl back home, she called the non-emergency number for the station that Jones had given her.

She felt stupid doing it—it might be one of the other cops on the line—but sure enough, it was Jones who picked up, and all she said was, “It’s Steed again, he’s in the yard and he’s really high,” and Jones just told her to hang up and he’d take care of it. By the time she got back home, sans girl, Steed was gone and there was a squad car parked outside of her house, with Jones inside it waiting for her.

Clementine didn’t feel too bad about cheating on Steed with Jones. Steed had started giving her some bullshit lines recently about how she was too much for one man to handle anyway, and dropping little hints about how monogamy was unnatural, and who knows what he would get up to when he’d disappear? She figured that turnabout was fair play, as long as she was discreet about it.

What she did feel bad about was the tattoo on her back that said S T E E D, so the first chance she got, she went to the same guy who’d done the original work and had him change it into S T E E L Y D A N. And because she had the room, she added on the album artwork from _Gaucho_ , too. But that ended up chewing up a big chunk of the rest of her savings, and the magician’s assistant gigs that she’d been using to scrape by were starting to dry up.

Jones seemed to like being a cop, so the next time Steed was off on a binge, she called him over and asked him about it. “It’s not so bad,” he said, as they were curled up in bed together. “The pay’s low and the schedule’s shitty, but parts of it are fun.”

“What do I have to do?” Clementine asked, as she propped herself up on her elbow to look at him.

“Come down to the station and apply,” he said. “There’s some tests and other stuff, but they’re pretty easy.”

Jones was right—the tests and other stuff were easy. The hardest part was not smoking any pot until she passed the drug test, and Steed actually helped with that. When he found out that she was applying for a job with the Sheriff’s Department, he saw it as an opportunity to get away with even more petty crimes than he normally did and supported her completely…in his own way, which meant getting all of the drugs out of the house until after she got the job. Then they came roaring back with a vengeance.

Clementine thought she’d be able to keep it all together, one foot on the right side of the law and one foot on the wrong, but the “wedding” that she and Steed had in the park, and its aftermath, turned out to be their last hurrah. She was willing to put up with a lot, but she wasn’t about to put up with a man who hit her. Once Steed’s broken jaw healed and he got out of the hospital, he came home to find all of his stuff on the lawn and the locks changed, with an implacable Clementine inside the house ignoring all of his entreaties.

That day, Clementine knew that she’d made the right decision. Not just in getting rid of Steed, though that was a correct decision by itself, but in joining the Sheriff’s Department. Because when the neighbors heard Steed outside pleading his case and called in a noise complaint, Jones was the first one there, and while the other deputies showed up as backup, Jones didn’t leave Clementine’s place until Steed was gone for good. She could never listen to “Deacon Blues” again without thinking of that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another canonical tattoo; Clementine references it in episode 108, "Clementine Gets Married," though I added on the album artwork as a little something extra.


	4. Divine Protections

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: firearms, accidental animal death

_The symbol for the heart chakra, on top of a green lotus flower, with a soft feathery plume of smoke behind it._

The best part of working at the Sheriff’s Department was whenever Clementine got to handcuff someone and throw them into the backseat of the car, because it always made her feel like a total badass. The worst part was having to carry a gun. No…that was the second worst part. Junior was the worst part.

Clementine liked men—all men. Back in her dancing days, she had found something to like about every single man that she talked to. The other dancers would conspire to stick her with the men they thought would be duds, but those men usually turned out to be the most fun of all. A guy wearing terrible aviator glasses might have a ridiculously sexy voice, or a gray-haired, balding older man would have a brilliant and beautiful smile, or a shy wallflower would loosen up after a drink or two and start telling the most outlandish and funny stories. Sometimes something as simple as the color of his eyes or the way his hands held his drink could make her fall for a man, at least for a song or two.

That feeling carried over to the Sheriff’s Department, to some extent. Clementine liked Jim because he was always up for a fun time and because he never hit on her, so they gently teased one another like best girlfriends instead. She liked Jones because he was pretty good in bed and because he liked her more than she liked him, which was a feeling that she’d always enjoyed. And Garcia…well, she liked Garcia because every so often, whenever they weren’t fighting or awkwardly flirting with each other, she would see a glimpse of the soft heart that he covered up with simmering rage, because that secret romantic side was something that he didn’t want anyone else to know about. And she also liked the way his mustache tickled her ear whenever they’d get drunk together and he’d whisper sweet things to her.

But try as she might, there was absolutely nothing that she could find to like about Junior. In fact, she would probably say that he was the one man that she hated. She hated the way he wore his stupid sunglasses everywhere, she hated how she couldn’t understand what he was saying half the time because of his indecipherable accent, and she hated the way he always stood behind her in the morning briefings, because she could have sworn he did it only so he could try and look down her shirt. She hated going out on patrol with him, because he’d inevitably make the car smell like wet dog and stale Marlboros, and he’d always, always claim to be too hung over to drive for at least the first half of their shifts, and if Steely Dan came on the radio, he’d just call it “fag music” and change the channel, even though she told him over and over again that they were her favorite band.

Junior would make fun of Clementine for reading the horoscopes in the paper every morning, or snicker when he overheard her telling Raineesha about the stuff she’d been reading lately on chakras and karma and cosmic energy balance, or pick on her for doing a tarot reading for Trudy on their lunch break—and then he’d refuse to get out of the car during a call out to an abandoned house because he claimed the place was haunted. How could someone believe in ghosts and not believe in karma or chakras? But Clementine wasn’t about to ask him to explain his reasoning, because then she’d have to talk to him for more than five minutes. So she left him in the car and checked the place out alone and found nothing out of the ordinary, and when she got back, about ten minutes later, she opened the car door and smelled a smell that she hadn’t smelled in a while. It was sort of like the Champagne Room after a dentists’ convention had been in town. Flop sweat, desperation, and…oh God, no.

“Junior,” Clementine said, “Did you just jerk off in here?”

“Nope,” he said, not looking at her, but she just knew that he was lying right to her face.

“I can smell it, you dumb-ass,” she said, “and there’s a camera in the car today.” She pointed to the dashboard camera with the red light illuminated. It had been running the whole time.

“Well, shit,” he said, but she could tell he wasn’t embarrassed in the least, because— _ugh, was this not the first time he’d done this?_ she thought, with revulsion.

“You’re disgusting,” she said, reaching into the car and picking up the radio with just the tips of her fingers. She hit the call button and said, “This is 11-Charlie-35, can someone send a car out to our last location to pick me up? Junior’s heading back by himself,” and she dropped the radio and threw the car keys at him.

“You gonna tell Dangle?” he called after her, as she headed toward the porch of the abandoned house, to sit down on the steps and wait for her ride.

“I don’t want to think about it anymore than I have to,” she said, and he gave her a little salute as he pulled away.

Clementine didn’t tell Jim exactly what had happened, but she did ask him not to send her out with Junior alone if he could help it. He just said, “I’ll see what I can do,” and got her off the hook for a couple of weeks. It meant she ended up riding around with Trudy more often than not, which was weird in its own way, but at least there were less likely to be bodily fluids involved.

However, when she and Trudy got a call to back up Jim and Junior, Trudy radioed back that they’d be there right away before Clementine could stop her. “What are you _doing_?” Clementine hissed at Trudy, who flipped on the lights and siren before she’d even dropped the radio.

“We’re the backup,” Trudy said, perfectly logical for once. “We’re only five minutes away.”

Clementine didn’t mind helping Jim, but the last thing she wanted to do was bail out Junior. As far as she was concerned, someone could shoot him right there and it wouldn’t be a great loss to humanity. But she wasn’t going to tell Trudy why, exactly, because she didn’t want to explain the whole horrible story.

For once, Trudy remembered to turn off the lights and siren before they got to their destination, so they quietly pulled in right behind the other car and the four of them made a hasty plan. “Okay, I’ll take the front,” Jim said. “Who’s with me?”

Trudy, with her ever-present shotgun, waved her hand in the air and said, “Me! I got you, Jim.”

“All right,” he said, as Clementine gave him a pleading look. He gave her one back, as if to say _I’m sorry_ , and said, “Clemmy, Junior, you take the back. If anyone comes out, just cuff them and throw them in the car.” They split up in the driveway and Junior led the way around the back of the house, easing the gate open as quietly as he could.

“You’re gonna want yours,” he said, indicating his gun. Clementine hated having to carry a gun in the first place, and she never took hers out if she could help it. She was the worst shot in the department because she never practiced. And she hated to admit it even more, but Junior was right, so she unsnapped the holster and took out her pistol, with some difficulty.

She heard Jim yelling “Sheriff’s Department” from the front of the house and the crash of the front door, and then a furious barking erupted from inside the house. A blur of brown and white fury came barreling out of the back door, hackles up and all snarling teeth bared at the closest target—which was Junior, who had just stepped on to the back porch.

The pit bull latched on to Junior’s left forearm with a death grip, knocking him back into the yard as he screamed in both shock and pain. “ **Aaaaaahhhhhh, sumbitch, gettim offa me!** ” He’d dropped his gun as he fell and his right hand scrabbled for it, uselessly, as Clementine just watched, helpless. What was she supposed to do? She looked to the back door of the house, but no one was there. The dog redoubled its efforts, dug in deeper. Junior caught her eye, his sunglasses were gone, she could see the fear in his face. “ **Clemmy, just shoot the fucker already, Jesus!** ”

Right. She was still holding her gun. She took a deep breath, aimed as best she could, squeezed off two quick shots and heard the dog yelp, saw it go limp and the blood start to spread, before she shut her eyes and put her gun back without looking. _Oh my God, I can’t believe I just did that_ , she thought, _and for Junior, of all people_. She heard footsteps on the porch and opened her eyes to see Jim, with Trudy behind him. “Are you guys okay?” Jim said.

“Call the fuckin’ paramedics,” Junior said, as he grabbed a white shirt from the laundry drying on the clothesline in the backyard and started wrapping his arm with it. Once he had the makeshift bandage in place, he picked up his sunglasses, put them back on, and gave the dead dog a kick. “Fuckin’ rabies shots _again_ ,” he said.

“You want me to stay until they get here?” Jim said. “We’ve just got to get these two perps down to the station, is all…” he trailed off.

“I’ll stay,” Clementine said, much to everyone’s surprise, but it sounded to herself like someone else saying it, detached and absent. She only half heard Jim calling the paramedics and telling her to go out to the front of the house to wait for them on the porch, only half watched him and Trudy driving away. All she could think about was how she had just shot and killed a perfectly innocent dog, for no reason. There _had_ to have been something else she could have done instead. It didn’t have to come to _that_.

She heard a lighter flick behind her, smelled a top note of tobacco over the coppery blood. “First time you shot somethin’?” Junior asked her, and she didn’t turn to look at him.

“Don’t,” she said. “Just…don’t talk to me.” She wanted to add _Not now, not ever_ , but that would have been more words, and she didn’t want to say anything in that moment. She just wanted to be left alone, in her misery and guilt, turning everything over in her mind again and again, which was what she did all that night and most of the next day, until she couldn’t stand the sight of her house anymore.

Clementine moonlighted as a model at the RV and boat shows, so the security guys at the convention hall knew her and they’d let her into anything she wanted for free. She wanted nothing more than to get lost in a large, anonymous crowd, so she drove downtown to find that this weekend’s event was a tattoo convention—just like the first date that Steed had taken her on, years ago. She slowly walked up and down the aisles, looking at everything without really seeing it, and eventually wound up stopping at the booth of something called “Soul Quest Divination” to watch a woman with bold blue-and-orange full sleeves of twining octopus tentacles ink a soft, beautiful design on another woman’s forearm.

When the artist was done, she put her tools down, went over the aftercare with the client, and then, once the booth was empty, caught Clementine’s eye. “See something you like?” she said, with a smile. The booth was filled with designs Clementine recognized—the Rider-Waite Lovers, rainbow chakras, the Wiccan symbol of protection—all with hazy edges, as though they were lit by candlelight.

“Did you draw all these?” Clementine asked. “They’re beautiful.”

The artist smiled again and nodded. “I’m Eryka,” she said, putting her hand out.

“Clementine,” Clementine said, taking her hand, but as she did, Eryka sucked in her breath with a little whoosh and gripped her hand tightly instead of just shaking it.

“Clementine, I think you came here for a reason,” Eryka said,” and you need to talk to someone. I can tell, just from your energy and your aura right now.” She put a “Back in 30 Minutes” sign on the chair in her booth and said, “Let’s go get a drink and you can tell me all about it.”

Once they were in the food court, the whole story came pouring out—not just the “haunted” house incident and the dead dog, but everything Clementine hated about Junior, and the department, and carrying a gun at work. She hadn’t realized, until she said it all out loud, how much everything had been weighing on her. “But I can’t just quit,” she said, amid the sniffles. “I’m stuck.”

Eryka nodded. “I see this a lot,” she said, sympathetically. “What you need is some realignment and balancing. I’ve got an idea that I think would help you.”

Back in the booth, Eryka sketched out a green lotus flower, with a heart chakra symbol on top of it and some swirly smoke behind the symbol. “Which side do you carry your gun on?” Eryka asked.

“The right,” Clementine said. Even as just a sketch, the design was gorgeous.

“We put this at the top of your right thigh,” Eryka said, “and the eternal love and peace that abides in the heart will protect you and permanently balance out the negative energy that comes from carrying the gun around all day.” It made perfect sense. There was only one thing left to find out.

“How much?” Clementine asked.

“For you, I’ll do it half price,” Eryka said, “only six hundred.” That seemed like a very small price to pay for some permanent energy balancing, and Clementine didn’t care that her rent was due in a week and that her car had started to make some funny noises every so often. While she went to get the cash, Eryka worked on refining the design, and even though the convention was about an hour away from wrapping up for the night by the time Eryka was ready to start, the security guy who came by to shut things down was one of the ones who’d let Clementine in that day, and he just winked at them.

The whole process took a few hours, but it was the nicest tattoo that she’d ever gotten by far, and Eryka was both meticulous and gentle in her work. Clementine felt much lighter when she was done, though she didn’t know if it was from the tattoo itself or from the relief of talking about everything with someone else. Still, whenever she looked down at the magnificent piece of art that Eryka had created, she felt a real, almost tangible sense of harmonious calm, and she was grateful that she’d made the decision to go to the convention that day.

Back at work on Tuesday, Clementine opened up her locker to find a note inside. It read:

_Dear Clemmy,_

_I know you don’t want to talk to me, because you wouldn’t pick up when I called you over the weekend, but I wanted to thank you for bailing me out with that dog on Friday. I’m sorry for making fun of you about karma and cosmic energy and I’m really sorry about—well, you know. I promise I won’t bother you about any of it ever again, because I think you were right about all that stuff this whole time._

_Yours sincerely,_

_Travis Junior_

_PS. I don’t have rabies_

She read the note through twice, then a third time, before putting it into her purse. _I’ll believe it when I see it,_ she thought skeptically, _and I’d bet he got someone to write that note for him._ She found it hard to imagine the Junior she knew actually writing something that was that coherent.

However, when she got to the morning briefing, Junior just gave her one of his little salutes and said nothing, and he started setting aside the horoscope section of the paper for her, and then she overheard him telling Garcia that maybe karma wasn’t a bunch of bullshit after all. And every time they went out on patrol together after that, Junior was always the first one out of the car to go check out what was going on, and he always let her listen to Steely Dan for their entire shift without complaint.

Clementine never got completely comfortable with having to carry around a gun, but the beautiful, protective tattoo made her feel better about it, and she eventually found out one thing she liked about Junior—underneath everything, she discovered that he was a man of his word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second non-canonical tattoo, but given Clementine's canonical interest in all things New Age, it seems like something she would believe in whole-heartedly.


	5. Like Them Or Not, The Facts Are Facts

_A portrait of a man wearing sunglasses, with a flat-top haircut, a mustache, and just a hint of a stubbly beard._

Someone needed to turn down the volume on the sun. It was too hot, and too bright, and too loud. Was the sun different in Miami than it was in Reno? It felt different. Or maybe Clementine was just more hungover than she’d ever been in her life, and that included the time the deputies had done ten shots of Jägermeister in a row, each, when Jones pranked them all into thinking that he was dead. What on earth had she _done_ last night to get herself into such a state?

The last thing she could clearly remember was running into Jones in the courtyard of the motel. It had looked for a moment as though the two of them were going to hook up, but then Raineesha walked by and Jones started coughing, loudly and obviously. It made Clementine realize that he’d probably already rejected Raineesha once that evening, and she was getting tired of having Jones only be into her when no one else was around to know about it. She deserved someone who wanted to be with her, no matter what anyone else did or said or thought.

From there, she’d grabbed her purse and room key and stormed off to the nearest bar, alone. There were probably some shots involved, and possibly some kind of specialty beverage they had in Miami that was called a “Mind Eraser,” and the vague memory of some awful guys hitting on her. And then, someone had stepped in to save her, but she couldn’t remember who he was, just that she had called him “my hero,” and brought him back to the motel.

Twice. They’d ended up back at the motel twice, which meant that they’d left at some point and come back. And that both times they’d ended up back there, they’d had some truly spectacular sex. Why couldn’t she remember who it was? It was almost like this stranger had been determined to carefully and methodically fuck every single memory of who he was straight out of her mind. And if that was the case, mission accomplished. All she could remember was that it had been, hands down, the best sex of her entire life.

Wait a minute—maybe he was still there! She carefully rolled over in the bed to see if anyone was next to her, but she was alone, and all the movement did was make her nauseated. Before she could make any progress in finding this mystery man who had so thoroughly rocked her world the night before, she had to find a way to start feeling not just better, but at least more human again.

_Jim,_ she thought blearily, through the pounding headache. Jim could help her fix this, he could fix _anything_. He had magical gay superpowers that let him party hard and never, ever get hung over. All she had to do was find Jim. But to do that, she’d have to get up. So she braced herself for the wave of nausea that inevitably hit when she finally made it upright and staggered down the motel walkway, holding on to the railing the whole time, until she found Jim’s room door open and stumbled inside. “I’m in love,” she said, collapsing onto Jim’s bed and waking him up.

“You’re in love?” Jim said, pulling off his eye mask. Jones was waking up, too, in the cot next to Jim’s bed. She hadn’t realized they were roommates. “You know, you’ve got a bandage there.”

She did? Clementine looked down to see a medium-size bandage taped down to the top of her left breast, which she hadn’t even felt in the struggle to get upright without succumbing to the dry heaves. “Oh my God, if I’ve been stabbed, I’m going to be so pissed,” she said, but it didn’t feel anything like that. In fact, she had a sinking feeling that this had something to do with why she and the mystery man had left the motel the night before.

She carefully peeled back the bandage to reveal just what she’d suspected—a fresh tattoo. _Oh God, no_ , she thought. She couldn’t get a really good look at it, but it looked kind of like a face. A man’s face. The face of a man with sunglasses and a mustache and the shadowy hint of a stubbly beard just starting to grow in…

“That’s him!” she said, loud enough to make herself cringe as her head throbbed. “This is the man that’s been making sweet dirty love to me all night long!” The all-night-long part wasn’t entirely true, but Jones had just rejected her the night before and she wanted to spite him a little bit.

Jim had found his glasses at this point and took a bit of a closer look, without being obvious or lewd about it. “It looks kind of like Richard Petty,” he said.

“You’ve been making love with Richard Petty?” Jones asked, a little sulky.

“No, but I have to find this guy,” Clementine said, crawling into the bed that Jim had just gotten up from. “I have to find who this is.”

“You’re not gonna find him in here,” Jim said, as Jones got up and headed for the shower.

“I know,” she said, into the pillow. “I just can’t move right now. What have you got for a hangover?”

Jim gave her a little white pill for the nausea, three ibuprofens for the headache, and a combination of Pedialyte, ginger ale, and cranberry juice that was less disgusting than it sounded, but it was well into the afternoon before Clementine felt remotely normal again. In fact, she tuned out most of the stuff about the bioterrorism attack and having to step in as cops for the entire city, as well as Kimball yelling at her for kicking her out of their room the night before. “I had to sleep over at Trudy’s,” she said. “Do you know what that’s like?”

“I don’t,” Clementine said. She honestly had no idea and didn’t want to think about it.

“Well, don’t let it happen again,” Kimball said, sterner than usual. That wasn’t likely. Who knew where this mystery man had disappeared to? Miami was huge and he could be anywhere.

Clementine tried to pitch in on the serving and protecting, but it was hard for her to focus. At least Jim didn’t assign her a partner. Every chance she got, she’d visit another tattoo parlor, looking for answers. She must have made it to thirty of them, and at each one, she’d get the same blank looks. “No, we didn’t do that.” “No, you don’t look familiar.” “No, we have no idea who that is.” There were only a couple places that asked her to take her top off all the way for the sake of comparison, and just the one where it turned out that the first guy she talked with wasn’t a tattoo artist at all, but a leering, handsy plumber instead. At least the shop’s manager yelled at him about it, which was pretty satisfying to watch.

The whole quest confirmed her hypothesis that tattoo artists were largely the same no matter where you went. Some of them were good artists and some of them were terrible artists, but they were all the same kinds of people. She was no closer to figuring out whose face was permanently marked on her chest after hitting as many shops as she could, until the short, angry deputy mayor fired all of them and she found the flyer for Ron’s Discount Tattoo while packing up her stuff to head back home. “Oh my God!” she said to Kimball, who looked over at her, skeptical as always. “This has to be the place!”

Ron recognized her right away when she burst into the shop. Well, he didn’t quite recognize her face. “But I definitely recognize the cleavage,” he said. “How are you, Clemmy?”

“I’m in hell, Ron,” she said. She unbuttoned her shirt, showed him the tattoo. “Did you do this? Who is this?”

“Oh, that came out real nice,” Ron said. The guy in the chair, who Ron was working on, enthusiastically agreed with his assessment.

“But who is it?” Clementine said, with no patience for Ron’s laconic tone. She had finally found some kind of an answer to her predicament and she wasn’t about to let Ron hold out on her.

“Well, you came in here with this guy, an older guy,” Ron said. “Looked to me like he was homeless.” Like he was homeless? The man who had saved her at the bar—the man who’d shown her the best night of love that she’d ever had—the man whose face was now permanently etched onto her skin—was nothing more than some random bum?!

“So what you’re saying is,” she said, as measured as possible, so she wouldn’t start crying, “I stumbled in here, with a vagrant, and I defaced my chest.” Why did Ron let her do it? Why didn’t he stop her? He had to have seen how drunk she was, and he went ahead and did it anyway. Her assessment of Ron’s character, which was not high to begin with, was rapidly dropping.

“You faced your chest,” Ron said, but Clementine was in no mood for any kind of witticism. “I can turn it into a unicorn, if you want,” he called after her, but she was already out the door before he was able to finish his sentence.

She was too upset to unpick the threads of the evil plot to take over the town, and even during the prolonged golf-cart chase, she didn’t bother firing her gun at anyone. It was like she was watching herself go through the motions of what she was supposed to be doing. Nothing got through the detached, floating haze of her self-loathing.

Sure, they captured Deputy Mayor Spoder in the end—and blew him up, in classic Reno Sheriff’s Department fashion—and all the cops in the convention center eventually got the antidote, and everything turned out okay for everyone else, but it was a solemn, somber Clementine who found herself waiting for the bus back to Reno, looking out over the bay, as Garcia joined her down by the water.

Clementine realized, perhaps a little too late, that she had barely talked to Garcia all week. Maybe he knew something she didn’t. Jim and Jones knew about the tattoo because they’d found out right after it happened. The women had all teased her about it. She figured Junior already knew about it, since he usually went out on calls with Jim, and even if he didn’t, it wasn’t like she was going to tell him. Only Garcia, who had that mournful kicked-puppy look on his face again despite being the one who’d flown the helicopter and gotten Spoder to surrender in the end, and even though he was the big hero of the week, had no idea.

“Clementine,” he started to say, but she cut him off.

“Garcia,” she said, “you know I got this tattoo, right?”

“I did not know that,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. His sunglasses…but that didn’t mean anything, all of them wore sunglasses. It couldn’t mean anything.

“All week long I’ve been looking for this guy,” Clementine said, unbuttoning her shirt to show the tattoo, “and I don’t know who this is! I just thought, dammit, Garcia, you know, finally I could…come home to somebody.” That was the feeling that had been making her so angry since she’d talked to Ron. The feeling that there was someone out there who had made love to her like he loved her completely—selflessly and unconditionally—and she was going to have to leave whoever it was behind and go back to Reno and go on with her life, like none of it had ever happened.

“The same thing happened to me,” Garcia said, as he unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his shorts to slip them down just a little bit, to reveal a yellow and red and blue tattoo, square in the middle of his left butt cheek.

“You got a tattoo,” Clementine said, in disbelief. It was her own face, staring right back at her.

She looked at her tattoo, and looked at Garcia’s face, back and forth. It was difficult to tell from the angle, but the sunglasses looked the same. The mustache looked the same. Oh God, even the haircut looked the same. Was it possible? Was it even real? Had the answer just been as simple as something—someone—who she’d been looking at this whole time?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fifth and final tattoo for Clementine, and a canonical one to boot. This chapter is essentially a recap of the events of _Reno 911!: Miami_ , but with a focus on Clementine's perspective.


	6. Come with Me and Walk the Longest Mile

_A portrait of Clementine, with a cloud of blonde hair, looking over her left shoulder, with a blue background inside a circular red border, and with two little blue flowers at the bottom of the border._

On the flight home to Reno, as Terry's terrible album played in the background and everyone else helped themselves to the liquor on the jet, Clementine had time to think, and the more she thought, the more sense it made. It really had been Garcia all along. Garcia who had saved her in that awful dive bar. Garcia who had made sweet dirty love to her that night. Garcia's face tattooed on her breast and her face tattooed on him right back. It felt like fate, like something coming full circle right back to where it all had started.

She sipped her drink and watched Garcia trying to relax and have a good time and knew how much he hated everything that was going on, and yet she also knew that he was going to so much effort to pretend not to be miserable so that everyone else could have their fun. She thought about the tingly, goose-bumpy way it felt whenever he'd whisper in her ear, and about when they'd first tried dating, a few years ago, how he'd calmed down long enough to be almost tolerable to everyone else for at least a week. And about how terrible she felt when he blew up at her that night at Pete’s and told her it was over, how she watched him go and laughed it off to everyone else and then how she went home and cried herself to sleep.

They were older now, and they knew more—both about one another and about themselves. There was no reason not to try again. Maybe they'd fail, but Clementine had failed at plenty of things before. She wasn't scared of failing. She was scared of what would happen if she didn’t try.

After they'd been home for a couple of days, she called Garcia and invited him over. This time, she didn't get high, or drunk, or anything. It was just her, and him, and a conversation, like adults.

"Do you want to do this, for real?" she asked him.

"I think I'd like that very much," he said.

That night they made love completely sober for the first time, and it was…well, it was fine. It wasn’t like it had been in Miami, but it was all right. She thought at first that it might have been some kind of a fluke, so she tested it out over and over again, and each time, the result was the same. It was okay—just consistently okay. Clementine thought that she could learn to enjoy it, but after he’d fall asleep, she’d lie awake and chew over everything in her mind. They were still the same people, but something was different. What was it?

In the meantime, she went through the motions of what she thought it meant to be a good girlfriend, trying to convince herself that this sort of comfortable mediocrity was completely acceptable. When Jones drunk-dialed her at two AM for a booty call, she broke things off with him for good. Garcia hadn't exactly asked her to, but it felt like the right thing to do if she was going to be with Garcia for real. Jones hadn't seemed that upset about it, either; he just apologized for calling so late the next time he saw her, and that was it.

She tried hard not to pick fights with Garcia over stupid things, especially because she hated seeing that sad kicked-puppy look on Garcia’s face whenever she did, but sometimes she just couldn’t help it. Clementine thought she wanted comfort and contentment, but what she really wanted was to feel something stronger, something more. She had every reason to let things go and just settle down and be happy, but something was still missing between them. What was it that she was looking for?

It had already started to snow when Jim assigned her and Garcia to transport the prisoner down to Carson. Clementine offered to drive, since Garcia had been extra weird about driving in snow ever since he and Jim had to be rescued by the firefighters up by Tahoe, but they got hung up on the paperwork down at the Carson station, and the roads were all but impassable by the time they were done. She could see the fear and anxiety written all over his face, and so instead of pulling back on the highway, she turned the squad car into the Motel 6 parking lot and said, “Let’s head back tomorrow once the roads clear up.”

Clementine braced herself for another evening of mediocre sex, but this time, she would be thoroughly disappointed…in the best way. Because it wasn’t mediocre at all. It was amazing—even better than it had been in Miami. It felt perfectly normal, and correct, and yet wonderful, and mind-blowing, and passionate, all at once. It was the exact kind of thing that she’d been looking for, her entire life.

As they held one another close, Garcia drifting off to sleep with his head on her chest, right over the tattoo of his own face, Clementine couldn’t stop thinking about the night. As crazy as it sounded, she thought briefly about moving into the motel for good. She wanted to stay there forever and never leave. Stay there forever…wait…Miami and Carson. The other times this had happened, they were somewhere else. They weren’t in Reno. And whenever they were in Reno, everything between them was weird, and awkward, and occasionally terrible.

“It’s Reno,” she said, incredulous, and Garcia stirred.

“What’s that now?” he said, not quite awake.

“There’s nothing wrong with us,” Clementine said, and he shifted to look up at her as she continued, “There’s something wrong with Reno.” The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Could that be why everything that happened in Reno always seemed to go so horribly wrong, no matter what?

Garcia didn’t quite believe her, at first, but over the next month, she convinced him to put her theory to the test. They went to Tahoe, and Truckee, and back to Carson, and each time, it was the same. Every time they left Reno, it was like a switch flipped and they were better versions of themselves, more honest and understanding and nicer to one another. And when they got back home, the switch flipped back and things got weird and awkward between them again. By the fourth time it happened, Garcia was just as convinced as she’d been back at the beginning.

“What are we gonna do?” he asked her, the day after they got back from their most recent weekend trip. “I want to be with you, Clemmy, but we can’t keep bein’ awful to one another whenever we come back to Reno.”

Fortunately, Clementine had an idea. “Who says we have to come back to Reno?” she said, with a smile. “There’s two openings in the department down in Carson.”

When they asked Jim to sign the transfer paperwork, he readily agreed, under one condition. “Can I tell Wiegel you’re dead, though, just to fuck with her?” he asked, and Clementine realized that she truly didn’t care. Ever since she figured out that it was Reno that was making her act the way she did, she never wanted to come back there again.

They planned to leave without saying goodbye, right after the parade was over. The explosion that destroyed Tacos! Tacos! Tacos! Tacos! was an even more convenient cover story for Jim’s plan to mess with Trudy, and it had the added bonus of feeling like the most appropriately Reno way for them to leave it behind forever.

Carson was nice. The department down there promoted Garcia to sergeant almost immediately, which he loved, and Clementine found herself spending much more time processing shoplifters and issuing speeding tickets, rather than busting up meth labs and conducting prostitution stings. It almost felt like a little piece of paradise to have a predictable schedule each week and to know she’d have someone to come home to each day.

Clementine hadn’t known it when she suggested Carson as a possible destination, but Garcia’s daughter lived there, and that might have been part of why he had so readily agreed to her plan. Her name was Trina, and the irony of that being the name she’d had on her first fake ID was not lost on Clementine. It felt like another piece of harmonious cosmic energy echoing down through her life.

She never pushed to meet Trina; she let Garcia take the lead there. Family was complicated, and Clementine had never wanted kids of her own. But one day, as they were driving home from work, he said, “I invited Trina over for dinner,” and Clementine started to worry, but it all turned out to be for nothing. Trina was wonderful, probably because Garcia—the prickly, angry, half-crazy Garcia that he’d been back in Reno—had almost nothing to do with her upbringing.

Trina called Clementine “Tina,” short for “Clementina,” and before the end of the meal, the two of them had become fast friends. They ganged up on Garcia, a little bit, and he pretended not to like it, and from then on, Trina, and eventually also her husband, and then eventually also their kids, would come over for dinner every Sunday night.

Clementine and Garcia had put together a new life for themselves down in Carson, the kind they never would have been able to have in Reno. Garcia still went back up there from time to time to see his friend Roy Beckert and get his old Datsun worked on, but Clementine never once looked back. The only times she’d think about the past would be when she’d catch a glimpse of one of her tattoos in the mirror, or when she was getting dressed, and remember the circumstances that led to it.

The dim basement that smelled like gingersnaps and tobacco and the taste of Southern Comfort mixed with Dr. Pepper lip gloss. The sweaty smell of the Raging Kitten and the rasp of a man’s beard on her skin. The feeling of being stoned and the mixed-up harmonies of Steely Dan. The way it felt to have your energy held in absolute balance and alignment and the promises made and kept, even to this day. The bright hot Miami sun and the perfect love that she had felt—could still feel—every single time she reached out to touch it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last of the tattoos - and another canonical one to boot! 
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to come along on this journey with me. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!


End file.
